ED avoids this conclusion in essence because it avoids all three of these criteria. First, as mentioned above, in ED there is a clear delineation between variables that are ontic and those that are epistemic. In the analysis of EH, they always assume that “semi-classical" means not just that the gravitational field has a certain mathematical form, but that it is a separate physical resource that can be controlled, manipulated, and detected in a measuring device. By contrast, in our model, while the gravitational field always has a precise value, this value cannot elicited in the process of measurement. It must instead be inferred from reading a material detector that is itself quantum mechanical. Thus the detector and the electron must be treated together by a joint quantum state. Furthermore, ED does have a clear interpretation, and it is certainly distinct from the usual Copenhagen interpretation. This allows ED to satisfactorily resolve the problem of measurement [1]}[2]}. Indeed, in ED a measuring device is not described as a black box subject to rules that violate the Schrödinger equation, but as a physical process subject to the very same laws that describe the rest of the world. As a result, in a fully covariant ED, such as the model developed in this thesis, the process of measurement is described by the same causal flow of probability that characterizes any other physical process. Claims, like those of EH and others, that semi-classical gravity leads to superluminal signaling are thus, more properly, viewed as an artifact of a rather primitive interpretation of quantum theory. Given a satisfactory relativistic model of the measuring device itself, no such issues are expected occur in the ED approach.
